Sunday, June 26, 2016

Eric Mondays part 8... on Sunday

I've been showing the various envelopes and other bits of mail art I've sending Eric for his 'Fifty' call on Mondays, however this series fits with today's Sunday Stamps theme, flags and ensigns.Between 2008 and 2012 USPS issued a series of stamps titled 'Flags of Our Nation'. There were six separate issues of 10 stamps, printed in coils of fifty. Interestingly, when researching for this post, I found out that the 5th set was issued here in Columbus on 11 August 2011. Since the stamps were issued over several years, the values change from 42c, to 44c, and finally to Forever.'But 6 times 10 is 60,' I hear you say. Yes, the 50 states were in there, then they also included flags for the US territories (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands) as well as the District of Columbia.'OK, now we're getting closer, but we're still only at 56 stamps.' The final four stamps showed the Stars and Stripes of the national flag against four separate scenes inspired by the first four lines from the song 'America the Beautiful', for a grand total of 60. O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! I had wanted to create something related to the 50 states for Eric's 'Fifty' call. I saw some images of the 50 states arranged in the style of the elements of the periodic table, and I had my idea. I added four different rankings to each 'element', using the official postal abbreviation, printed them out on postcards, and voila, mail for Eric. The 16 cards were posted one at a time, every few days for several weeks.I also sent the bonus 10 stamps on a 'master plan'.

Okay, I will admit that I didn't actually read all of the above before skipping down to the pics...so it was actually fun trying to figure out what was going on and a nice surprise to see the map in full at the end!